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<TITLE>Narrative Resume of Martin Dickey</TITLE>

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<H1><CENTER>Narrative Resume </CENTER></H1>

<P>
Here's a narrative resume, in reverse chronological order. 
<P>
I'm new to UW, having arrived this summer from <A HREF="http://www.ic.edu">Illinois College</A>.
IC is a small liberal arts college in historic Jacksonville, Illinois.
 Founded in 1829, IC was the first college in the state to grant
a degree.  Perhaps its best-known graduate was William Jennings
Bryan. There were other famous visitors in the early days, including
<A HREF="http://204.249.224.196/lincoln/index.html#order1">Abraham Lincoln</A>
(ask me sometime about the Lincoln chair) and Stephen A. Douglas.
<P>
At IC I taught practically every computer science course in the
catalog. 
<P>
Before that, I was at <A HREF="http://www.asu.edu">Arizona State University</A>
in Tempe, AZ, doing a Ph.D. My dissertation was about neural network
speech recognition. Languages and linguistics, <A HREF="http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~acl/">computational</A>
or otherwise, have long been an interest of mine.
<P>
Before drifting into ASU's graduate program, I had worked for
Honeywell for 11 years, first in Washington D.C. and then in <A HREF="http://www.ci.phoenix.az.us/">Phoenix</A>.

<P>
My job with Honeywell in D.C. was customer support at the international
headquarters of a <A HREF="http://www.teamster.org/">notorious and demanding non-profit organization</A>.

<P>
For most of the Honeywell years in Phoenix, I was an operating
systems developer. The OS was GCOS-8, a mainframe system supporting
multiprocessing, multiprogramming, transaction processing, and
large database systems (<A HREF="#GCOS8" >more about GCOS-8</A>).
 
<P>
Before going to Honeywell, I worked as an applications and systems
programmer for the U.S. Maritime Administration, a block from
the White House. The District of Columbia was the most interesting
place I've ever lived (outside of a summer in Munich) until coming
to Seattle (unless you count that year in New York which I never
tell people about and which cannot be detected from my resume).
<P>
Before D.C., I did a Master's (math) at the University of Kentucky,
and a B.S at Kent State University, a few miles from the Ohio
town where I grew up. In fact, from the windows of my junior high
school classrooms I could see buildings of the KSU campus. Now
we're practically back to my idyllic childhood -- a good place
to stop. As you might deduce, I'm old enough to remember 3-cent
stamps, 48-star flags, the Hungarian uprising, and Sputnik.
<P>
Aside from computers and languages, music has played a big part
in my life. Even before moving to Seattle I had made four trips
to Seattle to see and hear <A HREF=" http://www.lucidcafe.com/lucidcafe/library/96may/wagner.html">Wagner</A>'s
epic <A HREF="http://www.utu.fi/~hansalmi/ring.html"><I>Der Ring des Nibelungen</I></A>
(plus three trips for other reasons). Since those visits have
usually been in July or August, I have developed the firm impression
that Seattle has a delightful Mediterranean climate not unlike
Nice or San Diego. Nothing has occurred since my arrival July
22 to shake this belief. 
<P>
<IMG SRC="images/line_rainbow.gif">
<P>
<A NAME="GCOS8"><U>More</U></A><U> about GCOS-8</U> (the OS) and
DPS-8 (the hardware architecture).  GCOS, its history and internals,
is unfortunately not well known (that's the book I should have
written). It was comparable in many ways to IBM's MVS. Our hardware
architecture, particularly memory management, was more advanced
than that of the IBM 370/3090 line (our main competitor), and
probably influenced the design of the Intel 386 (another untold
story); GCOS-8 had in turn been influenced by Multics, to which
Honeywell owned the commercial rights (a story which has been
told and which has an unhappy ending).  <BR>

<P>
Each native process sees memory as a variable set of unforgeable
&quot;descriptors&quot; which give access to protected virtual
address spaces ranging in size from one byte to many megabytes.
 Separate access keys are associated with each descriptor.  (This
segmentation scheme is almost completely orthogonal to a virtual
memory arrangement with two levels of page tables.)  It was possible
under this scheme to give each global variable and each activation
record its own address space, making constants truly unmodifiable,
giving hardware protection against bounds and pointer errors,
providing a secure method for passing parameters by reference,
and so forth.<BR>

<P>
There were many other noteworthy innovations in the system, many
of them going all the way  to the predecessor non-virtual system
of the late 1960's: GCOS-III, which started life as GECOS.  The
GE originally stood for General Electric, which entered the mainframe
business in the 1950's but sold out to Honeywell around 1968.
 Among many features that can be traced back to GCOS-III (or earlier?)
are: support for symmetric multiprocessing (up to eight CPUs);
databases (the CODASYL network database model derived from a Honeywell
product); on-line support (time-sharing and transaction systems
which both which ran rings around the analogous IBM products);
a secure and flexible file system, etc. etc.  Of course, one can
find blemishes and limitations, too, especially with the benefit
of hindsight.<BR>

<P>
Shortly after I left Honeywell, the company spun off its computer
division into an independent corporation that was owned jointly
by Honeywell, NEC, and Bull (France), all of whom had historic
ties to or vested interests in various of Honeywell's computer
products.  Since then, the spin-off company has evolved into a
subsidiary of Groupe Bull called <A HREF="http://www.enterprise.bull.com/" >Bull HN Information Systems, Inc.</A>
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